Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) continued its industry-leading efforts to encourage employee adoption of electric vehicles (EV) with the opening of the largest, single-building EV charging installation in the State of California on Tuesday.

As part of its employee personal vehicle charging program, the company opened 90 additional EV charging stations at its Bishop Ranch campus in San Ramon. PG&E’s employee charging network now includes 400 level 2 chargers for employee use with plans to add an additional 200 more chargers during 2016.

Through PG&E’s Electric Vehicle Incentive Program (eVIP). employees receive a $2,000 cash incentive from the company towards the purchase of any EV or plug-in electric hybrid vehicle (PHEV) manufactured by Ford Motor Company or General Motors. Over 1,000 employees have participated in the program since its inception in December 2014.

“PG&E employees are leading the way on electric vehicle adoption,” said Dave Meisel, senior director of transportation and aviation services for PG&E. “The combination of cash incentives and our aggressive expansion of employee EV charging stations is making electric vehicle ownership viable for our employees. They now enjoy the same benefits of EV ownership that we do in our fleet, including lower total cost of ownership due to reduced maintenance and fueling costs and the environmental benefits due to reduced emissions.”

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By Jeofrey Bean

Tap the insights and experience of successful customer experience professionals to improve your fleet services.

A board of directors advises the company about its overall business strategy. A customer experience advisory board is similar, but is specific to the topic of customer experience. If your company is serious about improving its customer experience, a key step is to create an advisory board dedicated to that end.

The job of a customer experience advisory board is to identify where the existing customer experience can be improved and to recommend when a new customer experience should be created.

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The Daily Courier

Arizona Public Service (APS) is replacing its 2,138 fleet vehicles – cars, forklifts, ATVs, bucket trucks, etc. – with electric alternatives where economically feasible.

“Just as we’ve worked to modernize our grid and provide cleaner energy, we are now modernizing our fleet to reduce our carbon footprint,” said Donna Easterly, APS Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer.

“The fleet will be more efficient and last longer, and our bucket trucks will operate more quietly which makes inspecting and repairing power lines safer for our linemen and less disruptive for our customers.”

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And now Wall Street is making a $1billion bet on Uber’s lease business

Bloomberg

In its relentless pursuit for growth, Uber needs new drivers, and many of those drivers need cars. To help them get started, Uber has been offering short-term leases since July through a wholly owned Delaware-based subsidiary called Xchange Leasing, LLC. It partners with auto dealerships, advertises to drivers, manages risk, and even pays repo men to chase down cars whose drivers aren’t making their payments.

Xchange may be key to Uber’s continued expansion as it tangles with Lyft in the U.S. and a bevy of competitors abroad. Uber announced a partnership with Toyota last week to finance even more cars. This year, Uber said its financing and discount programs, which include Xchange, will put more than 100,000 drivers on the road. That requires dipping into the vast pool of people with bad or no credit.

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ALD Automotive UK has opened a new Development Centre in Bristol to accelerate its development in new digital applications and products, focused not only on the UK market but also across the entire ALD Automotive group.

Backed by significant financial investment from ALD International, the Development Centre is located near ALD Automotive’s current UK headquarters as well as the location of its new head office, which will open in December 2016.

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By Eelco van de Wiel, Managing Director, FleetInsurancePlus

European fleet consulting firm FleetVision has formed a unique partnership with FleetInsurancePlus to define a proper fleet insurance strategy taking into account risk profiles and corporate culture.

Optimal insurance structures, optimal pricing, improved risk profiles, enhanced reporting, and monitored supplier performance are the elements in the mix for an optimized total cost of insurance.

The difference between ‘best in class’ and the market average amounts to 600 Euro per vehicle per year

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ucsusa.org

Nearly half of all the electric vehicles (EVs) sold in the US have been sold in California. Is this because only Californians are interested in using EVs to go get tangerines from that on the off-ramp by the 2?

To understand why more EVs are being sold in California, UCS teamed up with Consumers Union to field a representative survey of drivers in California and 9 Northeast states that assessed driving behaviors and vehicle needs, and also attitudes and understanding toward EVs.

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Detroit Free Press

The U.S. auto industry’s home state of Michigan is preparing for the advent of self-driving cars by pushing legislation to allow for public sales and operation — a significant expansion beyond an existing state law that sanctions such vehicles for testing only.

While widespread use of driverless cars may be years away, lawmakers and transportation leaders say the technology is progressing so rapidly that Michigan must stay ahead of the curve or risk losing automotive research and development to other states.

Under a newly introduced package of bipartisan bills that would update 2013 laws to allow for the operation of autonomous cars on public roads without anyone at the wheel, tight “platoons” of smart commercial trucks could travel in unison at coordinated speeds.

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By Brian Matuszewski, Manager, Sustainable Strategies, ARI

The constant demand for fleets to adopt more sustainable, environmentally friendly vehicles is nothing new. In fact, it has only gotten – if anything – more pressing over the years.

Lower gas prices have taken some of the urgency out of the discussion to consider alternative fuel vehicles, but questions around the long-term effects that traditionally fueled vehicles have on the atmosphere and environment remain.

The impact of vehicle emissions is significant: nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from vehicles and 83 percent of GHG emissions attributable to transportation come from light, medium and heavy duty trucks. A recent report from the University of Michigan suggests, however, that individuals who choose to adopt simple, well-known sustainable measures can have a big impact on the overall environment. In fact, the authors specifically considered measures people could take that would not require a major change in lifestyle.

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The Detroit News

Ford Motor Co.’s updated Fusion Energi hybrid has a best-in-class range of 610 miles, a 60-mile improvement from the prior model, according to EPA estimates.

The plug-in sedan, on sale now, has an all-electric range of 21 miles, and gets an estimated 42 miles per gallon combined city and highway from its 14-gallon fuel tank.

While other plug-in hybrids have greater all-electric ranges, none top Fusion’s combined range of 610 miles, Ford says.

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